1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of contact center technologies and, more particularly, skills based routing in a standards based contact center using a presence server.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional contact centers are implemented using proprietary hardware, software, and communication protocols provided by contact center solution vendors. The various components provided by the vendors are incompatible with one another, which results in a situation where customers are locked into a particular solution and are unable to integrate technologies and/or improvements from competing vendors or independent third party developers. An inventive standards based contact center disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/680,304 entitled “IMPLEMENTING A CONTACT CENTER USING OPEN STANDARDS AND NON-PROPRIETARY COMPONENTS” establishes a contact center architecture that is not proprietary and which is referred to as an open contact center.
The present invention is an extension of the open contact center of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/680,304 that provides specific inventive details for one contemplated arrangement for implementing a skills based routing function. Specifically, the present invention utilizes an open standards based presence server to provide skills based routing capabilities, which is a technique not performed by any known contact center. Conventional contact centers rely upon proprietary code, interfaces, and protocols to perform skills based routing and do not leverage capabilities of conventional presence servers, which inherently perform many operations that are necessary when routing contact center calls to agents based on agent skills.
Additionally, no known presence server utilizes the specific technique disclosed herein, which permits the presence server to be easily integrated into an open contact center. A conventional presence server is a physical entity that centrally manages presence information for a set of users and devices to which other users and devices can subscribe. FIG. 1 (Prior Art) illustrates a conventional system 100 that includes a presence server 120. In system 100, a communication node 110 provides presence information to the presence server 120. The communication node 110 can include presentity 112 (e.g., a user) that utilizes a presence user agent 114 (PUA) (e.g., a computer, phone, or other communication device). The presence server 120 can function as either a presence agent 122 that handles received presence information and handles subscription requests or as a proxy 124 that forwards requests to other entities. Presence information about node 110 can be stored in data store 126 and can be automatically updated when status changes to presentity 112 and/or PUA 114 occur. A series of watchers 130-136 can subscribe to the presence server 120. Each watcher 130, 134 and 138 typically corresponds to a particular presentity, such as Presentity A, Presentity B, and Presentity C. Thus, a user desiring current presence information for Presentity A can query watcher 130 and a user desiring current presence information for a Presentity C can query watcher 138.